More Writing 2

[jfz9580m]

14. Ruminating this morning

My own feelings have been in flux as I get to what I hope is the last year of the most annoying bullshit ever. I am unambiguously filing many complaints, while explicitly leaving out a handful brainiacs I have met over the years who would qualify for “mindnumbingly stupid but not malicious”. But I am at capacity wrt that category so except the 20 or so boneheads I met, no.

Mindnumbingly stupid people are people too!!!!

Yes I suppose they are, but : 1) my eardrums and brain are very precious to me; 2)there is already about 20 idiots like that and 3) it takes too much away from people one actually cares about who have made one’s life better to keep forgiving the dumbest morons one has ever met. So no.

The rest of the mind numbingly stupid will along with the outright malicious and creepy face the consequences of their behaviors in the last 15 -16 years.

I expect coming years to severely test one’s patience and temper. I was always a bit short tempered. My temper tends to flare up and die down and really its better than bottling things up.

But you get to the point where you can no longer avoid conflict and then one has to be calm. Like most people I don’t enjoy conflict, but it is unavoidable and these guys have in their hubris really put themselves on display all the while thinking its people like me who are getting caught on camera proving their points.

The backward and regressive really do not see themselves. One plus some of us have as gloomy lefties ruminating about our own various shortcomings have is that when you look up instead and notice that these guys are shitty for everyone and chaos and mob/cult dynamics are all they have, you start to feel better.

And one thing about Trump is he demoralizes everyone and it is in a way an advantage for people like me who can cooperate, but not join groups in a mob or cult style. That’s what leads to bullying and groupthink.

I am much happier in the herding cats dynamic of a lot of difficult and gloomy people moving forward in a clunky and unwieldy fashion, but with time-tested alliances. I prefer genuinely pleasant cooperation. But that is rarer, with these many damn people all with their own
“i have the bestestestestestestestest ideas ever!” Gary seems to be In that group. Shut up Gary.

There has been a strain of a type of movement in recent years in science, on the left that is very happy to throw away environmental issues, women’s rights etc as inconvenient and to form a response to Trump that is populist in a way that sort of goes “tsk..come on bro, we can dispense with these women.”

And well, I could never be “Go Team” with women or anyone where it is about powerful women just as much as powerful creeps (power doesn’t make women creepy, but never cared for the girlboss. When a Dem female president eventually wins it could well be the sort of non-spectacular female politician you see in Europe who dully legislates. My favorite type of politician - devoid of personality and charisma.)

But I am cool as long as I don’t have to join groups too closely aside from support for genuinely screwed over people rather than the eternal futile human quest for power rather than survival. I just don’t get it. I am allergic to power. What is appealing about it? Otoh one has to survive in these damn hellscapes.

Unlike those grating computer science analogies I loathe (The brain is just like a computer!!!!! No it isn’t. Stfu. The real world is an open world game system!!! It really isn’t!)

Otoh the dynamics you see in biology, which unlike CS majors in this unbalanced CS idiot and economist run hellscape, presently biologists generally have the sophistication to not extend in metaphors to reality in moronically rigid ways.

This ghastly imbalance leads to out of favor sciences developing superior intuitions about how to use metaphors usefully.

It is a hypothesis anyway. I wouldn’t be opposed to computers or even ai in a sane world. Even I respect Prof Ryan Williams, Prof Lecun and have a Stockholm Syndrome flavored acceptance of Prof Hennessy. Anyway he has mostly retired.

I get now why the last 14 years were hell -rigid, clunky, mechanical thinking versus the sophistication of biological organisms and processes. Ai and computers-bah. A calculator is a useful thing. Quite different from painting a smiley face on one and saying - “see! Its practically human!!! No better!!!”

As my mentor used to say..boneheads.

He was so cool. It wasn’t torture to be around him.

But this I think is the future despite my certainty that I will always want to cut and run and I will do it too if it gets crowded. Small and stable is all I sign up for. But farther away this works:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/break-it-to-make-it-how-fracturing-sculpts-tissues-and-organs-20260227/

“It’s fracturing, but not in a way like you might imagine,” said Hervé Turlier (opens a new tab), a physicist at the Collège de France in Paris and a member of the team that characterized this process (opens a new tab) in mouse embryos. Typically, fractures are fault lines that propagate haphazardly under stress and spread through inert materials, such as ice, rock, or concrete. But the fractures that Turlier’s colleagues observed in mouse embryos display different characteristics. They emerged via a tightly controlled mechanical process, governed by differences in physical tension and cells’ bonds to one another. The fractures were also only temporary: Within hours of splitting, the cells sealed back together again. And these fractures were constructive, sculpting new shapes from developing tissues, in an evolutionary approach that scientists are uncovering across the animal kingdom.


Of course even science writing that uses biological metaphors can become cloying and grating in the other direction from the “Thwunk thwunk thwunk” torture of the CS major’s CS analogies.

The minimalism and elegance that characterises the biological world is absent from human built and made things without finesse.

Of course the beauty of science only exists far from the Epstein adjacent type (🤮 . A lot of stuff finally makes sense when dealing with unseen influences.

Epstein was surprisingly relevant. He poisoned society and I bet he was only the tip of the iceberg. I barely paid attention to him till recently.
His interest in science explains a lot about what I found disgusting or deeply depressing.
This sort of dimwitter diletantte’s love of

What actually makes scientists love science is the grueling and unpleasant parts. Not the 3 s or so when things work and to constantly derail that part with nuisance tech.
I get angry all over again when I think of it. It makes sense now and my therapist (he was Jewish so so much for the anti-semites who keep tracking the most meaningless patterns. Epstein was a meninist creep. But “our meninists are so cool!!!!” The fuck they are.) from 2012 said that when people understand how society works they get really angry.

To paraphrase “The Stepford Wives”. Men okay. Meninists no. I vaguely sympathize and all. Apparently it is very hard to be male and not a huge nuisance.
It is not as if I like women and whenever women start to mimic the behaviors of these creeps you get the bosses. I do hate everyone. But the sheer nuisance level of the male of the species on the whole exceeds the other.
The only thing I hate more than computers and ai is humans. Like Carlin one tries, but it is certainly an uphill species..Like Gary.

I should not be posting ruminations online.
But it could come in useful in a court case some days since I have never been depressed.
I find these societies depressing. Especially when your identity gets muddled as you ponder some bizarre person who Ubik like seems to infest your head. Information changes the brain back. I couldn’t have believed in such weird shit.

I wish I had not deleted some stuff which I did over the years when I had no hope of returning to my old self from July 2011. It is a relief to disentangle external drivel. It was unrecognizable and I knew it was not innate or organic. I am mentally healthy. I always was.
But articulating offhand what one’s relationship to these nightmarish societies is..


It always takes effort and thought. And humans are key to understanding. Adam Becker, this really cool science writer gets it.